Single Sign-On Integration

by Kate Mueller

We know how hard it can be to manage an ever-growing suite of tools and software across your organization. While we work hard to keep improving DevResults to meet your M&E data management needs, we know we're not the only piece of software in your toolbox. We're continuing to look for ways to offer smooth and more seamless integration with your other tools, and so we're happy to now offer Single Sign-On Integration (SSO) leveraging Active Directory.

If you have no idea what SSO or Active Directory are, it's okay--your IT folks do. If you log in to a variety of software using the same username and password and that account is administered by your organization, you likely have some type of SSO set up already. We now offer SSO integration using:

  • Azure Active Directory
  • Active Directory via OAuth2

What Are the Benefits of Setting Up SSO Integration?

There are oodles of articles out there on the benefits of SSO integration (e.g. like this), but for most of our clients, the main benefits are:

  • By leveraging your existing SSO system, it means you have one less username and password to remember.
  • If you are already logged in via Active Directory, after your initial account creation in DevResults, you won't have to enter a username and password again.
  • Including DevResults in your SSO integration helps establish it as part of your standard software toolkit, which can be great if you're trying to get more buy-in from different offices or projects.
  • It can help remove bottlenecks around getting your users initial access to DevResults. With our SSO integration, you define a default group that any users created via Active Directory sign-in will be assigned to. This can be a great way to give anyone in your organization View-only status to DevResults without having to manually create DevResults accounts for each of them.
  • Most Active Directory administrators enforce specific password policies around expiration, password complexity, etc. Leveraging integration with Active Directory extends these same policies to those DevResults users, keeping your site a bit more secure.
  • Our SSO integration still also allows you to have users outside your organization. So, for example, you can set up SSO integration so that all of your own staff can easily and quickly get into DevResults, but you can still create and administer DevResults-only accounts for local partners or field volunteers to facilitate data entry.

How Does It Work?

You'll need to coordinate with your IT administrator for your Active Directory, and the steps are a bit different depending on whether you're using Azure Active Directory or Active Directory via OAuth2. This help page provides a much more detailed walkthrough of the DevResults portions of the setup.

Broadly, you'll need to do some configuration on the Active Directory side and then go to Program Settings in DevResults and configure the connection there using some of the information from Active Directory.

As always, if you have questions or recommendations on other integrations we can offer that would streamline your organization's use of DevResults, please feel free to email me at kate@devresults.com.